Role: UX Designer
Project Length: 2 months
Type: B2B Software new feature design
Impact: Beta feature in Early Access
Background
During my internship at Braze, I designed a beta feature to help Marketing teams create more precise campaigns using complex data. As part of the Data Ingestion team, I tackled low adoption of an Early Access feature that led to incorrect audience targeting and wasted budgets. The existing solution caused confusion, impacting both customers and Braze’s Sales team in competitive deals.
From the Braze website. Users can create marketing campaigns with a variety of filters and data
Research
I kicked off the research by interviewing Product, Solutions Consulting, and Sales teams, while also gathering insights from competitive analysis.
Internal interview with a Product Manager highlighting how confusing and unclear the process was when creating a campaign with complex (nested) data.
I supplemented competitive research with existing documentation, product demo videos, third-party reviews, and support docs since accessing competitor software directly was challenging without a paid account.
Ideation
Early sketching sessions with the product manager, designers, and engineers were invaluable. They helped me grasp nested data—key to the feature I was designing—while also validating ideas for feasibility and identifying potential limitations with the team.
Wireframes
Collaborative sketching sessions helped me create low-fidelity wireframes, which I presented at our next design review. I based these wireframes on real customer scenarios to give a clearer picture of how the feature would work in practice.
For example, how could a marketer using Braze target users who’ve been on a basic subscription for over 2 months with a limited-time promo for an upgrade? How would they leverage nested data attributes to create a precise campaign? These are the kinds of scenarios I envisioned from the customer’s perspective to make the feature more user-friendly.
Prototyping
After several internal design reviews, I created high fidelity mockups and prototypes based on feedback.
We had two main concepts to test with customers. The first focused on exploring data attributes through expandable and collapsible menus, while the second centered around a search experience, allowing users to quickly find what they needed.
Since Braze users have different levels of technical expertise, we wanted to understand how they preferred to find the data attributes for their campaigns. Non-technical users might prefer exploring the data structure, while more technical users might opt for directly searching for the attributes they need.
Validation
While scheduling usability interviews with customers, I also gathered feedback from Product and Engineering to refine the designs before testing. Self-recorded videos were particularly useful for collecting asynchronous feedback.
I also created a user interview script to guide moderated testing with customers and led the interviews, observing how they interacted with the prototypes.
Videos walking through designs shared with the team for async feedback
Customer interview going through a flow on data structure
Final Designs
Most of the feedback focused on combining the explore and search interfaces into a single experience. This aligned with our hypothesis, but customer validation really helped solidify our design decisions. Given the varying technical skills of users, it made sense to offer a flexible experience that allowed both exploring and searching for data attributes.
Deliverables
After synthesizing our findings, I created a Jira ticket for the lead engineer to start development based on the designs. I also added annotations and guidelines to the designs before handing them off, referencing components from the design system. Unfortunately, this was right around the end of my internship, so I wasn't able to see the implementation of these designs in the Braze platform.
